


Haunted House.

by reidbyers



Series: Ralvez Week. [3]
Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ghost Hunters, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-07
Updated: 2017-09-07
Packaged: 2018-12-25 01:05:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12024855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reidbyers/pseuds/reidbyers
Summary: Spencer and Luke are two best friends (and more) travelling across the country with the intentions of visiting the most haunted places in America, spooky hot spots and speaking with the utmost of respected believers in the paranormal. What follows is nights of horror as they stay in haunted houses and visit old murder sights, Spencer spewing out scientific fact while Luke remained convinced something strange is going on.





	Haunted House.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey there thanks for tuning in to day three of Ralvez Week! Yesterday’s prompt is “Alternative Universe” and I decided to combine two of my favourite boys for this fic. I love the Buzzfeed series “Buzzfeed Unsolved” where Ryan and Shane go around talking about true crime and visiting paranormal hot spots. This fic is inspired by one of my favourite episodes,

“Are you sure you don’t want to go back home?” Spencer looked over to Luke, barely visible due to the fact the only light around them was the headlines pointing out onto the road. They were on some empty road in the middle of nowhere, dead trees and other plants surrounding the sides of the road which only created an even more creepy atmosphere. Quiet music which neither of them were really listening to played in the background purely because Luke didn’t want to be sat there in the silence while in a place like this, he was undeniably freaked out already which Spencer found both amusing and adorable, he wasn’t nervous in the slightest but Luke on the other hand was anything but pleased with the events that were going to be taking place.

While they both had normal jobs, ever since they had started dating Luke had been introducing Spencer into the world of supposed ghost hunting - a phrase he wasn’t too keen on because he worried it might suggest that he was in someway out to harm the ghosts, ghosts that Spencer didn’t believe existed in the slightest. Luke was what you could describe as a hardcore believer, he’d had small experiences with the paranormal both when he was younger and when he was an adult. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that ghosts were real, he found them fascinating while also being completely terrifying but Spencer could not have been any further away from him on the believer spectrum. Skeptic didn’t really come close to how he felt, he was a man of science and nothing in science pointed to the existence of ghosts or demons, anything along those lines really. He humoured Luke because he wasn’t going to make fun of anything someone was passionate about, if this was what he believed in then okay but he couldn’t force himself to play along.

“We’re not going back now.” Luke said before reaching into his jacket pocket to pull out his phone, the light illuminating his face as he unlocked his phone and went into his notes. He had made a list of everything that had happened at the place they were driving to which happened to be Waverly Hills Sanatorium, a hospital build in the 20s to help contain the outbreak of patients with Tuberculosis. It was anything but a pleasant place to be visiting but it had quite the history of being haunted, visitors told stories of doors slamming and footsteps being heard when there was no one else around, lights flashing even though there was no power left in the building. Then there were the people who claimed they saw people, a little girl and boy who would run up and down the halls, a woman with bleeding wrists begging for help, a man in a white coat who was assumed to be a doctor. If they wanted to witness a haunting, there was no doubt that this was the place to go.

Some 80s pop song played quietly in the background as they drove up towards the hospital, the bubbly tune somehow gained an eerie feel to it as the pair looked forward at the huge building in front of them. It looked exactly what you would expect a haunted hospital to look like, huge empty windows just waiting for someone to be peering out of it and while Spencer thought the building was beautiful he could agree that in the dark it did have a creepiness to it. Did that mean there were ghosts there? No, but he could understand why Luke would think there would be and why so many other people would as well. They of course would not just be trespassing on the property, they had made plans to meet with the woman who ran the tours of the facility and was allowing them to spend a few hours there. It made Luke feel a little better knowing that there was going to be at least one other person around, so if they did end up being attacked by some ghost of a patient at least there’d be someone else there to at the very least know they were there in the first place.

The cold wind made Spencer break out into goosebumps once they got out of the car, he held his coat closer to him as he waited for Luke to get their flashlights and camera out from the backseat of the car. When they first met Spencer would have never expected this to be the sort of thing Luke was interested in as while it was a prejudgement he had assumed him to be into the stereotypical masculine things; ghost hunting wasn’t exactly on that list. It was nice seeing someone you loved be passionate about something which was why Spencer had been so willing to come spend a few hours here despite it not exactly being top on his list of things he wanted to do. Take out the paranormal part of things and this was a historical building so there was always that, it would be an interesting night no matter what because he already knew Luke was going to be freaked out.

“We’re going to be fine.” Luke down from where he had been looking up at the hospital and instead met Spencer’s gaze, he didn’t feel any good vibes coming from their surroundings but at least he had Spencer here with him. He was like a bright light in this otherwise eerie world and he hoped that would stop him from being so scared, it wasn’t common that Luke got scared but this was the one thing that got him. After he spoke to Spencer for an extended amount of time they came to the conclusion that it was because with a ghost or anything paranormal like that there was nothing you could do to protect yourself, you could defend yourself against another human or animal and common things that scared other people didn’t affect Luke but this was the one thing that got to him. Because of that it was another reason Spencer tried to be respectful, Luke knew Spencer didn’t believe even one percent in ghosts but still he treated the whole thing as seriously as he could.

After speaking with the tour guide who gave a brief history of the hospital and the awful things that went down there (all things Spencer knew already and somethings Luke was horrified to learn) they were left to their own devices. This was not the first time they had visited somewhere haunted and if they didn’t end up dead because of some mysterious ghost accident then it wouldn’t be the last but no matter how many times they visited a place like this Luke felt like it was the most haunted place they visited. Waverly was no different, something about all the horrors that went on there just lead him to believing that there was going to be plenty of tortured souls here. He didn’t have a definitive idea of what a ghost was as he had heard so many different versions but no matter what, he wasn’t ever in the mood to mess with them.

“The fifth floor is rumoured to be the most haunted part of the building, there’s two nurses’ stations, a pantry, a linen room, medicine room and two rooms for patients either side of the nurse’s rooms.” Spencer recalled casually as he pointed his flashlight around the room he and Luke had found themselves in. Empty hospital beds lined the room, Spencer found it more creepy because of how there used to be people living there and now it was empty as if everything had been dropped all at once and all that remained of the lives once here were these empty rooms. Luke on the other hand could not stop picturing how many people must have been here and suffered, there had been rumours of patient abuse and experimentation done and it wasn’t far fetched to imagine that if ghosts did exist, the ones that lived here would not be particularly happy. It wasn’t like an old lady who died peacefully in her sleep in her home, this was god knows how many people being treated like less than humans all while suffering from this terrible disease. “Do you want to go up there now?”

“Can’t be much worse than this.” Luke sighed and pointed his flashlight up at the walls, graffiti both new and some that had been attempted to be scrubbed away and for some reason it made him feel a little better knowing that more people had come here and had been okay enough to do graffiti. If they had been getting mauled by a ghost he couldn’t imagine the first thing on their mind being to get their spray cans out of their bags and paint inappropriate things onto the walls. Just knowing life had been around recently was comforting, he still didn’t feel the most happy while in there. There was just an atmosphere of sadness, clearly awful things had gone on and the walls had contained that.

“No, I think it can be.” Spencer spoke in a higher pitch voice, trying to mask his smile because while he knew Luke was slowly getting more and more spooked out with each unexplainable noise that he heard or as he opened up his phone to look at his notes and having it only aid in his disgust at the things that had gone on there; it was cute seeing him so nervous. Neither of them were particularly jittery people, Spencer had gotten over his fear of the dark long before he met Luke and so the only thing he had to worry about here was the possibility of running into someone who shouldn’t be there, Luke argued that maybe they’d run into a ghost and Spencer had to bite his tongue to stop himself from laughing at the imagery of them walking into a white sheet floating.

On the way up to the fifth floor they discovered more horrors, rooms where electroshock therapy took place which while Spencer riled off facts about the history of electroshock and how it affected the brain, Luke was carefully walking around the room with the knowledge that this must have been one of the more haunted rooms. If he were a ghost then he’d want to warn people away from the place he previously suffered so when he felt a strange breeze behind him with no windows or anything open and he quickly darted out the room, he told himself that the ghost was just being nice. Spencer hadn’t even noticed Luke had left at first so when he turned around to see why he wasn’t answering his question, his first thought wasn’t what if he had been taken by a ghost which he was certain would be Luke’s first thought but instead what had spooked him so much?

“I swear to god if I see a little boy in here…” Luke spoke hesitantly in case his words somehow encouraged the spirits to act, they were walking down the long hallway in which most of the sightings were rumoured to be in. He fiddled with his camera as they walked, trying to get the night vision working despite knowing if he looked through it and saw anything remotely out of the ordinary he was going to drop the thing and leave. The pair were having two completely different experiences, Spencer wouldn’t say he was having a good time because they were in a place where a lot of people suffered and died but he found the whole historical aspect interesting, Luke on the other hand might have preferred not to know all the stuff that had went on because it only fuelled the fire; the fire being him believing there were some pretty pissed off ghosts around them who might not mind doing them some harm.

When they eventually made it up to the fifth floor and this time Spencer could not stop himself from smiling as he heard Luke hum anxiously at the sight of the long, grey hallway in front of them. There were many large doorways either side of the hall which only made him assume even more that something was going to jump out, that some horrific sight was going to be there when he turned his face and looked into one of the rooms. He took a deep breath and tried to regain some calmness, standing still for a few moments before walking ahead and leaving Spencer in the dust so to speak.

“So, what happened up here?” Spencer asked as he danced his flashlight up onto the ceiling, he didn’t usually like to freak Luke out anymore than he already was because he acknowledged that he genuinely was a believer in these things and what kind of boyfriend would he be if he just spent the whole time making fun of him for his beliefs? He also knew that sometimes Luke got a little too strung up and it was a good idea to remind him that he was with someone who didn’t believe in those things, a reminder that there always was a possibility that he was scared of nothing. Luke looked over to Spencer with the intention of telling him to shut up but he saw where his light was pointing and his first thought was to look up, something he quickly regretted as what if there had actually been something up there?

“You know what happened up here.” Luke replied coldly, pointing his flashlight in Spencer’s direction so he could see the smugness on his face much clearer. Part of him was trying to distract himself from where they were by being annoyed at Spencer, it served a much easier task and he didn’t really want to be thinking back to all the things the tour guide had told them about such as the people who came up here and found themselves jumping to their deaths, seen shapes moving and even heard voices telling them to get out. If he heard some strange voice that wasn’t Spencer’s he was expecting himself to just drop dead out of fear, there was no way Spencer would be able to explain that with all his science talk and while some of Luke wanted him to be a believer as well it was almost comforting having someone around to point out the flaws in things. A lot of the time it was annoying, but sometimes it was nice.

“Which story? There was the story of the head nurse who ended up hanging herself in the very room we find ourselves in now…” Spencer let his words trail off as he and Luke walked into Room 502, the room with the most reported activity in the whole hospital and Spencer swore he could hear Luke’s shoes scuffing against the floor, dragging them against the ground as his mind told him not to go in there but his body did so anyways. “Or the nurse who jumped off of the roof patio and fell multiple stories before hitting the ground? I’m sure you already know the stories of the little kids-”

“Reid.” Luke warned as they looked around the room, it was reasonably large but empty, not much to look at which Luke didn’t know whether or not he should be thankful or not for. He’d been told that people had slept up there before but there was not a thing on earth that could make him stay in this place all night. Not even Spencer who it could be argued was one of the most important things to Luke could make him do that, he didn’t fancy being traumatised for life and having nightmares.

Spencer quieted down after that, allowing Luke to look around and try an spot anything out of the ordinary. It was a windy day so whenever a particularly large gust of wind hit the building Luke’s head would jerk up as his first thought was always something was now in the room. When he did next speak it was to suggest turning the flashlights off for a little while, something that Luke had told him about doing when they visited other places but Luke was not all that keen to do it here but he complied nonetheless. Before they turned the lights off he made sure he was close to Spencer, close enough that if something touched him he could jerk toward and grab his boyfriend and drag him the hell out of there. They stood there quietly for what was actually only around a minute but felt like a forever for Luke, it was relatively peaceful though until Luke felt something touch the back of his neck, it was cold and almost felt like a small electric shock.

“Fuck!” Luke yelled from surprise, his first reaction to reach down and grab Spencer’s hand and start to head towards the door, wrestling to switch the light back on even though he was scared he might see something he didn’t want to see. Spencer’s heart was also beating faster but that was just because Luke’s outburst had seemingly come out of nowhere and had been unexpected; well perhaps not unexpected because Spencer had assumed he would get scared like that at some point, he just wasn’t expecting it right then. “Did you feel that?”

“No but I think you scared away anything that might have been in there.” Spencer squeezed Luke’s hand in an attempt to comfort him as they hurried down the stairs leading to the fourth floor and so forth. He knew that Luke wasn’t ready to leave just yet because there was still more to explore but he just needed a few minutes to process what had happened, this wasn’t the first time Luke claimed to have encountered something and while Spencer didn’t believe anything had actually happened he was still freaked out and he had to respect that.

“Is that you admitting ghosts exist?” Luke wiped away the sweat that had started to bead across his forehead, he would have much rather had this conversation outside than from within the walls of the hospital but they were in there now and at least they weren’t on the fifth floor anymore.” Spencer smiled and shook his head, rubbing his thumb over Luke’s knuckles in the hopes it would help him come down from his shock.

“It’s me admitting you scared me and it’s cute your first reaction was to hold my hand. Now come on, you told me you wanted to come visit here and you’re going to see ghosts even if they don’t exist and this whole thing is a hoax.”

“Ruin all my fun, why don’t you.”


End file.
